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The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

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Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#11

Post by ACow_Adonis »

deanresin wrote: post #6

This conundrum reminds me of a thought experiment. You have people use a mental illness as a defense in courts of law. But could you not plausibly define anyone who commits major crimes to be mental ill? Mental illness could also be defined by a person's ability to function in their community and social constructs. But a healthy species, evolutionary speaking, requires these outliers. These deviations from the "norm"…

Sounds like programmers are obsolete because software will become redundant once we've solved everything in hardware :D

Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#12

Post by selfie »

deanresin wrote: post #6

This conundrum reminds me of a thought experiment. You have people use a mental illness as a defense in courts of law. But could you not plausibly define anyone who commits major crimes to be mental ill? Mental illness could also be defined by a person's ability to function in their community and social constructs. But a healthy species, evolutionary speaking, requires these outliers. These deviations from the "norm"…

So, this: https://xkcd.com/435/

Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#13

Post by deanresin »

triumphblr wrote: post #7
deanresin wrote: post #6

This conundrum reminds me of a thought experiment. You have people use a mental illness as a defense in courts of law. But could you not plausibly define anyone who commits major crimes to be mental ill? Mental illness could also be defined by a person's ability to function in their community and social constructs. But a healthy species, evolutionary speaking, requires these outliers. These deviations from the "norm"…

> Also, psychology is a dying profession. A mental illness is described as a set of symptoms manifested from physical biological systems we don't fully understand yet. But once understood, psychology becomes obsolete. That's a fundamentally reductionist perspective and assumes everything is biological in its etiology? For example, you could say we don't need a justice system once we have the biology worked out, or ar…

If you understand the systems that manifest a mental illness then you can treat it more directly with medicine, you can test for the mental illness directly with physical sampling. We've already seen this shift from psychology to medicine with the invention of anti-depressants. Less people are seeking counsel from psychologists and instead just getting a prescription from their doctor. While the systems and even antidepressants aren't fully understood we have seen the shift away from psychology due to advances in treating the physical biological system. Simply projecting this natural trend to its limit is not reductionist IMO.

Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#14

Post by [deleted] »

deanresin wrote: post #6

This conundrum reminds me of a thought experiment. You have people use a mental illness as a defense in courts of law. But could you not plausibly define anyone who commits major crimes to be mental ill? Mental illness could also be defined by a person's ability to function in their community and social constructs. But a healthy species, evolutionary speaking, requires these outliers. These deviations from the "norm"…

[deleted]

Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#15

Post by dangle1 »

It's very sad. DSM was never strictly meant to be a clinical diagnostic tool, but rather it was originally meant to define specific illnesses in a manner that would facilitate further research by allowing investigators to at least be talking about the same phenomena when comparing results. (and it unintentionally became very popular with lawyers, who argued that presence in the DSM equated to unimpeachable evidence of an illness in a client, another use that it was never designed to accommodate)

It's still true that there are only on the order of 8-12 well-validated diagnoses in the manual. Increases in the number of included diagnoses over editions is primarily due to concessions to important researchers as opposed to clear identification of previously undescribed illnesses.

There are lumpers and splitters in academic psychiatry. Lumpers are suspicious that there are several hundred discrete disorders of the brain that can't be more parsimoniously explained with existing, better validated illnesses.

Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#16

Post by xboxnolifes »

deanresin wrote: post #13
triumphblr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, psychology is a dying profession. A mental illness is described as a set of symptoms manifested from physical biological systems we don't fully understand yet. But once understood, psychology becomes obsolete. That's a fundamentally reductionist perspective and assumes everything is biological in its etiology? For example, you could say we don't need a justice system once we have the biology worked out, or ar…

If you understand the systems that manifest a mental illness then you can treat it more directly with medicine, you can test for the mental illness directly with physical sampling. We've already seen this shift from psychology to medicine with the invention of anti-depressants. Less people are seeking counsel from psychologists and instead just getting a prescription from their doctor. While the systems and even anti…

Even if we, as humans, collectively have the knowledge to reduce something down to some fundamental axioms, it does not mean there is no value to separating the disciplines. All fields of engineering are fundamentally just physics, math, and some civil knowledge. Likewise, being a biologist doesn't necessarily qualify you to be a doctor.

Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#17

Post by crtified »

deanresin wrote: post #6

This conundrum reminds me of a thought experiment. You have people use a mental illness as a defense in courts of law. But could you not plausibly define anyone who commits major crimes to be mental ill? Mental illness could also be defined by a person's ability to function in their community and social constructs. But a healthy species, evolutionary speaking, requires these outliers. These deviations from the "norm"…

> But could you not plausibly define anyone who commits major crimes to be mentally ill? Mental illness could also be defined by a person's ability to function in their community and social constructs.

A converse is the way public/media perception will use mental health itself as the reason or motivator for major crime.

For example, with the just-happened knife attacker in Bondi Australia : the resulting public discourse urgently searches for a cause - "why did this person do this? was it terrorism? revenge? drugs?". But no, soon enough the media latches on to Mental Health, and everyone sighs in relief that the reason is now found. "Ahh!", the mainstream can reassure themselves, "It was a Mental Health Person that did this! Of course!".

Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#18

Post by crtified »

Is there any condition with as broad a definition as autism?

It can cover anywhere from a non-verbal 9 year old with an IQ of 70, to a popular attractive valedictorian genius with incredible masking skills. A slow developing 3 year old labelled early and for life, or a perennial loner 80+ year old finally discovering that their traits are shared with many others.

Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#19

Post by triumphblr »

deanresin wrote: post #13
triumphblr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, psychology is a dying profession. A mental illness is described as a set of symptoms manifested from physical biological systems we don't fully understand yet. But once understood, psychology becomes obsolete. That's a fundamentally reductionist perspective and assumes everything is biological in its etiology? For example, you could say we don't need a justice system once we have the biology worked out, or ar…

If you understand the systems that manifest a mental illness then you can treat it more directly with medicine, you can test for the mental illness directly with physical sampling. We've already seen this shift from psychology to medicine with the invention of anti-depressants. Less people are seeking counsel from psychologists and instead just getting a prescription from their doctor. While the systems and even anti…

Sure, people are prescribed psychotropic medication for depression. But as more stringent scrutiny has been paid to those, the effect sizes have gone down over time and with more adjustment for publication bias.

There's no shortage of demand for psychotherapy services, and head-to-head they are comparable and both in combination fare best.

There is no blood test for depression, and if there is, no one uses it in practice. Sure, we're seeing this sort of thing with alzheimer's dementia but that's one thing that has never been amenable to psychotherapy, and even then there's a lot of psychotherapy around it in a palliative and coping sense because it's still uncurable.

FWIW, I was involved in the creation of DSM-5 so I'm very familiar with the whole area of mental healthcare.

Re: The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

#20

Post by p_j_w »

deanresin wrote: post #6

This conundrum reminds me of a thought experiment. You have people use a mental illness as a defense in courts of law. But could you not plausibly define anyone who commits major crimes to be mental ill? Mental illness could also be defined by a person's ability to function in their community and social constructs. But a healthy species, evolutionary speaking, requires these outliers. These deviations from the "norm"…

> Mental illness could also be defined by a person's ability to function in their community and social constructs.

Are you suggesting rebelliousness and non-conformity should be considered mental illnesses, defects to be cured?

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